Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: sustainability – Page 2

‘Solar battery’ stores sunlight for days, then releases hydrogen on demand

A new material can store energy from sunlight and convert it into hydrogen days later. The material, jointly developed by researchers from Ulm and Jena, can do this even in the dark. The process is reversible and can be reactivated several times using a pH switch. The results are published in the journal Nature Communications.

Green hydrogen is one of the most important pillars of the energy transition. It is produced from sunlight using photocatalytic processes. There are now a variety of technologies for converting and storing solar energy into chemical energy. But now, for the first time, a material that can store the energy from sunlight for several days and then release it in the form of hydrogen “at the push of a button” has been successfully developed.

“You can think of it as a combination of a solar cell and a battery at the molecular level,” explains Professor Sven Rau, who heads the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry I at Ulm University.

A new, useful absorption limit for ultra-thin films

The applications of ultrathin, conductive films such as those made of graphene have many applications, but it’s been thought their efficacy is limited to absorbing only half of the incidental light at best. A research group in China has now shown that absorption can be as high as 82.8% at light grazing angles nearly parallel to the film. This could not only significantly improve design efficiencies but sheds light on light-matter interactions at sizes much lower than the light’s wavelength. Their work has been published in Physical Review Letters.

Graphene ultrathin films, as thin as one carbon atom (about 0.34 nanometers, 300,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper) have many applications: flexible and transparent electronics, energy storage and batteries, solar cells and photovoltaics, sensors and high-speed electronics and more, where they absorb light.

While such films allow for miniaturizing devices and reducing their weight, their extreme thinness has led to the characterization that they are limited to absorbing only half of the incoming light.

How Flawed Crystals Are Powering the Future of Solar Energy

Defect-filled lead-halide perovskites rival silicon solar cells because domain walls inside the material separate and guide charges. Researchers visualized these charge-transport networks using a novel silver-staining technique, resolving a long-standing efficiency mystery. Perovskites made from

Major battery breakthrough paving way for EV upgrade

Chinese scientists have developed a lithium metal battery that boasts an energy density of more than 700 watt-hours per kilogram and stable performance at extremely low temperatures, marking a significant advancement in the production of high-energy batteries for electric vehicles. The research paper was published on Thursday in the science journal Nature.

Chen Jun, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and vice-president of Nankai University in Tianjin, was among the researchers who led the breakthrough. Chen said the team has replaced oxygen atoms with fluorine ones. It designed and synthesized novel fluorinated hydrocarbon solvent molecules, creating a new electrolyte system based on lithium-fluorine coordination.

Nano-cage removes up to 98% of PFAS in tap water tests

Contamination of ground, surface and drinking water by perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) affects millions of people worldwide. A promising new method developed by Flinders University scientists paves the way to help remove the most difficult-to-capture variants of these persistent pollutants from water.

The research team, led by Flinders ARC Research Fellow Dr. Witold Bloch, has discovered adsorbents that effectively capture PFAS, including short-chain forms that are especially difficult to remove using existing technologies.

The study, published in the Angewandte Chemie International Edition, showcases the use of a nano-sized molecular cage that acts as a highly selective “PFAS trap.”

A new form of aluminum unlocks sustainable and cheaper catalysts

A research team at King’s College London has isolated a new form of aluminum—a highly abundant metal, that could provide a far cheaper and more sustainable alternative to commonly used rare earth metals. Dr. Clare Bakewell, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry, and her lab developed highly reactive aluminum molecules able to break apart tough chemical bonds. Published in Nature Communications, their work has also unlocked molecular structures that have never been observed before, which creates the potential for new kinds of reactive behavior.

The team reported the first example of a cyclotrialumane, a compound comprising three aluminum atoms arranged in a trimeric—triangular—structure. The trimeric molecule carries unprecedented reactivity as the structure is retained when dissolved into different solutions, making it robust enough for use in a range of chemical reactions. These include splitting dihydrogen and the stepwise insertion and chain growth of the 2-carbon hydrocarbon, ethene.

Metals are vital for making a whole range of commodity and fine chemicals produced in industry. However, many processes, especially catalytic ones, use expensive precious materials like platinum, which are environmentally damaging to extract.

Tuning in to fluorescence to farm smarter: Monitoring plant light use saves indoor farm energy costs

Plant owners with a so-called green thumb often seem to have a more finely tuned sense of what their plants need than the rest of us. A new “smart lighting” system for indoor vertical farms grants this ability on a facility-wide scale, responsively meeting plants’ needs while reducing energy inefficiencies, clearing a path for indoor farms as an energy-efficient food security strategy.

The system was designed and tested in a study led by Professor of Plant Biology Tracy Lawson, who conducted the research at the University of Essex and is now a member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The work, published in Smart Agricultural Technology, emerged from her goal to help establish the viability of vertical farming for large-scale food production.

“One of the key aspects of [vertical farming], of course, is the energy cost associated with using LED lighting,” Lawson said. “So that’s where it all started, trying to save energy.”

Core–Shell Engineering of One-Dimensional Cadmium Sulfide for Solar Energy Conversion

Fabricating efficient photocatalysts that can be used in solar-to-fuel conversion and to enhance the photochemical reaction rate is essential to the current energy crisis and climate changes due to the excessive usage of nonrenewable fossil fuels.

Microsoft’s glass data storage system saves terabytes for 10,000 years

Imagine being an explorer, cracking open a 10,000-year-old tomb, uncovering a priceless ancient artifact – and getting rickrolled. Our deep descendants might just get the pleasure, thanks to a Global Music Vault due to be built in Norway, featuring Microsoft’s Project Silica, a tough new data storage medium that’s never gonna give you up.

There’s a common saying that once something is on the internet, it’s there forever, and even if you delete it, it will persist in some server somewhere. But that’s demonstrably untrue – just try to find your cringey old MySpace page. Even the most secure data center is vulnerable to the increasingly common and severe environmental disasters brought on by climate change. Many will lose their data if there’s a long-term power outage, or a large-scale electromagnetic pulse from an attack or, worse still, the Sun. Even in the best-case scenario, physical storage media like Blu-Rays, archival tape, hard drives and even solid state drives will degrade in decades.

To ensure that our history lives on for longer, Microsoft has been experimenting with storing data on glass with what it calls Project Silica. In 2019, the company demonstrated the tech in a partnership with Warner Bros by writing the 1978 movie Superman onto a slide of quartz silica glass and reading it back. The slide, measuring just 75 × 75 mm (3 × 3 in) and 2 mm (0.08 in) thick, could hold as much as 75.6 GB, and remained readable even after being scratched, baked, boiled, microwaved, flooded and demagnetized.

/* */